


By Any Other Name

by CactusJam



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: F/M, Feel-good, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-15
Updated: 2017-08-15
Packaged: 2018-12-15 19:02:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11812257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CactusJam/pseuds/CactusJam
Summary: Percy has lived with a lot of names in his life. He likes some more than others.





	By Any Other Name

Names aren’t supposed to be heavy. Especially not names like his. It comes with privilege and power and a million and one other things beginning with p that make life easier. But it’s fifty-two letters long, enough for the alphabet to fold all the way back on itself, and that’s a heavy name for a child.

So yes, it comes with power. He can say it and expect people to listen because of it, but it comes with other things too.

He almost got held back at school because part of the first year graduation requirements was being able to write your name neatly and correctly. His father set him lines to remedy this, so he spent the holidays copying it a thousand times on blank paper with his mother’s oh so beautiful signature to copy from. It was softer than his father’s, with curlicues and loops that made it look at lot more like art than writing. As a consequence, he could always write it beautifully, even when he was bone tired or still smouldering from the latest accident in the workshop. Even when everything else was chicken scratch. 

The elocution lessons came next. Standing and learning to shout his name like a shield while marching into battle. Whispering it like thunder across his father’s face the first time he disappointed him. Hours of his sisters’ gentle hands on his back, pushing his spine straight when it had almost grown naturally hunched from thousands of hours tinkering. Hours of learning that, when he could have been learning to rule, but he learned.

He was, he thinks, getting close to the point when he could really love it when everything happened. He had finally grown old enough to tell his father he was going to abbreviate it whether he liked it or not, because fifty-two letters and fourteen syllables is too much for anyone to handle.

He was starting to learnt the power behind it, even if he could only see the vague shape of the silhouette. He knew he would always get a booking at any restaurant he tried. He knew he would always get the best table, hadn’t even heard of sitting by the kitchen. He knew too, abstractly, that this is what people would call privilege, usually with a sneer on their faces. But he didn’t normally get to see those. People heard his name and turned down and turned away and said things like I’m not worthy. As a kid he found it impossible to interpret that in any way other than that he wasn’t.

He didn’t get friends or equals or playdates, but he got a name.

When everything happened he remembers, as much as he can, from that time, that that name spilled over to a second line in the newspaper headline and no amount of hyphens could save the authors from that.

He remembers, when he made those graves that weren’t graves at all because there was nothing left to bury, thinking of that old adage. A man’s not dead if his name’s still spoken. He speaks each of their names in turn, in full, his tongue rolling and sticking on every letter and sound and syllable to draw that life out a little bit longer. He leaves his name with them, not strong enough to live forever as the last of something, not strong enough to bear the weight of even one of those names, let alone all of them.  
He chooses a new one as he tinkers. It’s short, for him, and full of sharp angles. It bears a trace of the one he used to have but it’s so splintered and cracked it’s barely even recognisable. It fits. It fits better than his first name ever did.

He holds on to this new name for a long time as he finally learns the meaning of privilege, with a sneer. He works in the kitchen and the docks and all the other places that don’t exist for people who have fifty-two letter names. He learns things those people can’t learn either, and he tinkers with a far different kind of fire. Oddly enough, he blows himself up less, and his hair finally has the singe-free time to grow out, white. He guesses the colour belonged to the old name and goes back to hauling crates of slightly-rotten fish.  
He does this long enough he thinks he can bear the weight of his new name and live up to all the nasty caveats that come with it. He gets close, which is just the same as saying you nearly survived, so he didn’t live up to it. 

He’s thrown in a cell and there’s not a trial, per se, but there’s enough bureaucracy that someone find the name that doesn’t really belong to him and it gets read out to the audience. He shivers, long and hard, because that man is dead so people should not be speaking that name. They don’t really know what to do with him after that, because there’s a privilege that comes with having your name associated with tragedy that’s oh so much stronger than having it associated with power, so they throw him back in the cell. He’s okay with it. Here he doesn’t have to carry a name at all, just a number, and his mind is free enough to wander, just a little.

On some days he thinks maybe this is what being yourself is like. On other he thinks this is what going mad is, but there’s nout to be done about that so he grabs a piece of chalk and writes another crossword for himself. He finds, through this, that ‘oi you stop drawing on the walls’ suits him quite well too.

His next name comes to him through sheer dumb luck. He knows this because he is, quite literally, not going anywhere. There’s bickering through his slats and suddenly there’s a woman in his room, and a man who looks just like her, and they’re both staring.

“Hello handsome.”

He’s anything but, at this point. He’s the kind of skinny that got the drain in his cell narrowed and there’s enough filth on him to cover the starkness of his hair, but he can live with it. He can live with anything as long as his dead names aren’t spoken.

There’s a brief conversation with their friends that he’s not party to on the merits of rescuing the convict and he ends up going right on with them. He learns their names and they all suit him so well, bending like willow and crushing like rocks, and they ask his. He knows, from unpleasant experience, that there is no worse answer for this than silence so he grabs the first five letters and hopes to gods he can live with them.

Five of fifty-two, he thinks, surely, I am strong enough for five.

They accept this without blinking, apparently having mostly jettisoned those parts of themselves they couldn’t carry either. He wonders if anyone else has lost more than ninety percent.  
They give him new names too. Mostly the women but sometimes the men too, they pile them on and the barrage softens out some of the cracked edges. Still broken, but maybe not bleeding. So he becomes darling and handsome and dear. Eventually, he starts giving them back, not so kind so soon, but he loses the habit of using the full name and title and anything else they’ve given him and settles on calling them friend.

Eventually he has to go back, to the house , to the graves that aren’t really graves, and to the marker he left for his name.

“Are you ready Dear?” She asks, one hand on his shoulder and the other on her bow. They have fought too long together and he longs to give her something better than friend. So he gives her Baroness. It’s one of those that lay so heavily on him but it brings light to every corner of her eyes and he knows he needs to keep giving her things to make that happen. He works on it, and before too long he is down on his knees asking her to give him husband.

“Only if you’ll call me wife, Darling.”

And that was that. There was a reinstatement of titles before there was a wedding so he went full circle, right up to forcing himself to stand up straight lest he collapse under the weight. They rush through the vows, to save time and pain and to save the surprise, until they are walking out into a hall full of their friends and being announced.

There’s a pause, a marked silence, a ripple of laughter.

“You double-barreled?” Their bard shouts, between snorts. “Are you kidding me?”

No. His name is Percival Fredrickstein Von Musel Klossowski Byroden de Rolo the Third, and sometimes it feels so light on his shoulders that he’s afraid it will float away.


End file.
